A patient that has undergone a surgical procedure or otherwise has a limited range of motion of an extremity can experience a “frozen shoulder” or “stiff knee” as a result of a buildup of scar tissue. These conditions greatly limit the patient's range of motion of the arm or leg. Physical therapy is typically prescribed to work the knee, hip or shoulder or elbow to break down the scar tissue and regain proper mobility of the joints.
Ideally, the physical therapy would be provided once or multiple times daily over a period of weeks to restore the patient's motion. This creates a hardship for the rehab patients in time and money. To overcome this, many exercises have been devised to be done at home such as the elastic belts and other stretching devices. Unfortunately, unmonitored and unsupervised exercises expose the patients to additional injury, particularly after a surgical procedure.
Accordingly, there is a need to provide a system and equipment that can provide range of motion rehabilitation exercises in a controlled and safe way at a patient's home.
Furthermore, the objective is to provide the patient with a prescription for rehabilitation exercises that can be loaded remotely to a computer control system to provide a desired schedule and selected range of motion limits and forces chosen by the physician or therapist that can be securely accessed and monitored by the patient's physician or physical therapist wherein the computer is programmed to control the equipment and provide an accessible database documenting the exercise progress of the patient. The present invention as described hereinafter provides a safe and manageable home-based rehabilitation system.